U.S. 0-for-50 in air strikes on Iraq leaders at war's start / Fear of civilian toll not always a factor in raids, officials say

Douglas Jehl, Eric Schmitt, New York Times

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, June 13, 2004

2004-06-13 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- The United States launched many more failed air strikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

Only a few of the 50 air strikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful -- and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons -- appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.

The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value targets during a one-month period that began on March 19, 2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13 Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq's No. 2 official, the officials said.

Ibrahim is still at large, along with at least one other top official who was a target of the failed raids. That official, Maj. Gen. Rafi Abd al-Latif Tilfah al-Tikriti, the former head of the Directorate of General Security, and Ibrahim are playing leadership roles in the anti-American insurgency, according to a briefing document prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The broad scope of the campaign and its failures, along with the civilian casualties, has not been acknowledged by the Bush administration. A report in December by Human Rights Watch, based on a review of four strikes, concluded that the singling out of Iraqi leadership had "resulted in dozens of civilian casualties that the United States could have prevented if it had taken additional precautions."

The poor record in the strikes has raised questions about the intelligence they were based on, including whether that intelligence reflected deception on the part of Iraqis, the officials said.

The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound, south of Baghdad, remains a subject of particular contention. A CIA officer reported, based primarily on information provided by satellite telephone from an Iraqi source, that Hussein was in an underground bunker at the site. That prompted President Bush to accelerate the timetable for the beginning of the war, giving the go-ahead to strikes by precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles, senior intelligence officials said.

But in an interview last summer, Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the top Air Force commander during the war who is now the Air Force vice chief of staff, acknowledged that inspections after the war had concluded that no such bunker existed. Internal reviews by the military and the CIA have still not resolved the question of whether Hussein was at the location at all, according to senior military and intelligence officials, although the CIA maintains that he was probably at Dora Farms.

In retrospect, the failures were an early warning sign about the thinness of American intelligence on Iraq and on Hussein's inner circle. Some of the officials who survived the raids, including Ibrahim, have become leaders of what the DIA now believes has been a planned anti-U.S. insurgency, several intelligence officials said.

"It was all just guesswork on where they were," said a senior military officer. Another military officer described the quantity of "no-kidding, actionable intel" as limited, but added, "In a real fight, you go with what you've got."

Senior military officials said they were not sure whether the Iraqis deliberately deceived the United States in the information that they provided or that was intercepted.

An unclassified Air Force report issued in April 2003 categorized 50 attacks from March 19 to April 18 as having been time-sensitive strikes on Iraqi leaders. An up-to-date accounting posted on the Web site of the U.S. Central Command shows that 43 of the top 55 Iraqi leaders on the most-wanted list are in custody or dead -- but that none was taken into custody until April 13, 2003, and that none was killed by an air strike.

An explicit account of the 0-for-50 record in strikes on high-value targets was provided by Marc Garlasco, a former DIA official who headed the joint staff's high-value targeting cell during the war. Garlasco is now a senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, and he was a primary author of the December report, "Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq."

The broad failure rate was confirmed by several senior military officials, including some who served in Iraq or the region during the war, and by senior intelligence officials.

Moseley, the top Air Force commander during the war, said in the interview last summer that commanders were required to obtain advance approval from Rumsfeld if any planned air strike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 or more civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved, Moseley said.

But raids considered time-sensitive -- which included all of those on the high-value targets -- were not subject to that constraint, according to current and former military officials. In part for that reason, the Human Rights Watch report concluded, "attacks on leadership likely resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths from the air war."

In an e-mail message, Garlasco described the campaign to attack high- value targets as "abject failure." He wrote, "We failed to kill the HVTs and instead killed civilians and engendered hatred and discontent in some of the population."